From outside the box

I don't usually listen to music on the radio anymore because I don't care for anything I hear these days. Another sign of getting old I guess. When my son Brady is in the car he likes to listen to the oldie stations. As much as I used to love a lot of that music, it can be difficult to listen to most of it now. I mean, how many times can you listen to "I get around" by the Beach Boys or "Your just too good to be true" by Frankie Valley. Sometimes, to my sons objections, I reach over and switch the station when a certain song comes on. "I'm sorry Brady, I've been listening to Dianna Ross for over 50 years and I just can't take her anymore!"

Actually there is a lot of the old stuff I could listen to for another 50 years. People and bands like The Beatles, Kenny Logins, Dan Folgelberg, The Eagles, Neil Young, Poco, The Guess Who, The Moody Blues, these guys never get old, they will always sound good. It's that damn "Bubble Gum" music of the sixties and seventies that drives me nuts. Hated it then and I hate it even worse now.

I guess it's a good thing that Brady likes a lot of the old music. It shows he has good taste. I've been to some great "has been" concerts in Oroville over the years that I would have loved to have taken him to but they don't allow kids into a lot of those shows. Brady would have loved to have seen Heart, Glenn Campbell, Toto, America, Boz Scaggs, just to mention a few of the greats I have seen recently. I have always been grateful that he never got into country music, rap, or heavy metal. I can take the bubble gum of the sixties, even a little Dianna Ross now and then easier than I could any of that stuff.

So this morning as I was driving him to school and we were listening to the oldies on the radio, I got to thinking....I don't know the name of one popular song that is out right now. What is current music like? I don't even know where to find it. I asked Brady and he said that he didn't know where to find it either. He listens to it on his computer but never on the radio. I think the last "hit" song I can remember was that titanic song by Celine Dion. My God, I am so out of it!

Speaking of Celine Dion, I still think of her as one of those "new" artist. It reminds me of one time back in the seventies when somebody mentioned Frank Sinatra and my Dad said, "Oh yea, he's that new kid." Bear in mind that this remark was coming from a guy who once saw Al Jolson in concert in Chicago in the twenties. Sinatra was probably in his fifties when my Dad made that remark but now I understand where he was coming from. I still think of Abba as that new band from Europe and truth is, I think their all dead now.

I suppose there's a lot of good music being made these days. I think I got discouraged in the late seventies when I thought pop music was going to progress and keep getting better. That's really what it had been doing since the early rock and roll of the fifties. But somewhere around this time it took a turn for the worse and we got disco, punk, and heavy metal. I even checked out country music for a while back then hoping that maybe there was some kind of sanity there. I wasn't ready to loose the ballads, love songs, and sweet harmonies that I grew up with. Oh they were alive and well in country music all right....along with the sparkling jump suits, cheesy cliche's, and beers and tears crap that made me feel like my IQ was dipping every time I listened to it.

So that was that. I lost touch with pop music. I lost it and I'll probably never get it back again. But that's OK, I've got a pile of old CD's to listen to when I feel nostalgic. I guess the good old days are gone forever. The days when music had soul, it had purpose, it was real stuff, right from the heart. We used music to express our desire for freedom and change as well as to speak out against wars and social injustices. Now days the biggest happenings in the music world is Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan driving their cars into Paparazzi. Oh yea, there's also American Idol. You get all of the contemporary sounds there as well as Simon making retarded kids cry and Paula Abdul slurring her way thru a show as she pisses all over herself. God I miss the good old days.